Macs Freezing/Lockups

[jpilege]

I've had some odd issues that happened with some of our Macs in my company. We have over 100 Macs that are being managed with about 80 of those being used by employees. Other Macs are either shared or test machines.

Last Friday, we received a couple calls about someone's Mac freezing or locking up. The issue is that you can't type or access any menu bar items. You can open and close apps, but that's the extent. Throughout this week, we had a few more Macs with the same issue and have a total around 8 Macs with the issue.

I opened Activity Monitor, but don't see anything that isn't responding or using up resources. I was able to use Casper Remote and remote in as myself rather than prompting to remote into their side. When I remoted in, I wasn't seeing the issue that the user was currently having. I was able to type and open and close anything without trouble. Digging through the console and logs didn't show any issues. I tried removing the computer from being managed and then re-enrolling the Mac. The issue was still persistent. So far doing a hard restart fixes the issue temporarily.

The Macs are MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, with a mixture of OS X Yosemite, El Capitan and a couple macOS Sierras. I can't find anything in logs or see any issues with profiles or policies that are going out. Has anyone seen anything like this?

Let me know if anymore information is needed.

[bentoms · Accepted solution]

@jpilege I'd have a look at your config profiles, especially is one is pushing an empty loginwindow payload (as per this )

We'be had to combine profiles for a number of customers due to the issues in that post of mine.

[bentoms · Accepted solution]

@jpilege I'd have a look at your config profiles, especially is one is pushing an empty loginwindow payload (as per this )

We'be had to combine profiles for a number of customers due to the issues in that post of mine.

[CapU]

Hi @jpilege We saw the issue and depending on the software will give you the same thing. If you have Avid Media Composer and have installed the HD Audio app, the will cause some issues.
Also the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop app acts weird on some stations. Adobe has a are version of the software available

[jpilege]

@bentoms Thanks for the link to the article. I'll run through it and see if this helps determine a solution or if I need to go back to the drawing board.

As of right now, doing a hard reboot fixes the issue and will restart all of the processes and the reset the time. I'll check on a couple Macs that freeze up again and see what the time is at. Maybe the Macs lockup when the process his a current time.

Going through some system logs with my JAMF Buddy, we saw that Google Chrome tries to update and then the computer starts the lock up. I'm not sure if this is the issue or not, but have been updating Chrome as issues come by to see if they freeze again. I'll update again if this becomes a solution or not.

[jpilege · Accepted solution]

Google Chrome was not the culprit. It did come down to 2 configuration profiles. I had a profile for the Login Window payload and another one that handled the Security and Privacy payload. These were interfering with each other and caused issues with lock ups and freezing. Once I combined these 2 profiles, everything was back to normal.

[jpilege]

@bentoms Thanks for the link! It help curve the road to the solution. I didn't have to go as far as the article did, but after combining the profiles together that were listed, things were working. I marked your solution as a solution as well.

Thanks for all the help!

[FastGM3]

I'm experiencing similar behavior on the Macs in our environment. I've combined the Restrictions, Login Window and Security & Privacy payloads as suggested. However I do have a stand alone restrictions payload used just to lock the Profile Preferences, could that profile be causing the interference and lock ups?

Thanks